Crazy Like a Fox (Lil & Boris #3) (Lil & Boris Mysteries) by Shannon Hill

lesser extent, Kurt Danes.
    I succumbed. “Sure.”
    “I gave the gate guy at the Eller place a hundred bucks to tell me what he knew.” Punk harrumphed uncomfortably. “Turns out he knew quite a bit. They gossip worse than old ladies up there.”
    Cousin Jack had the same problem with his employees. Most were not locals, and it meant their social lives pretty much started and stopped on the estates. We’d take their money, but it was rare anyone took them to dinner.
    “Second call came direct to the house line. Housekeeper got it.”
    The house line at the Eller estate wasn’t listed. Not that I knew of. I jotted a note to check that.
    “They set up a ransom drop at the mini-mart on the highway.”
    Damn. Easy access to a four-lane road. From there it was a straight shot up to Charlottesville or down to Lynchburg, and lots of side roads along the way.
    “For six o’clock,” Punk continued. “Clay said to just drop the ransom and worry about chasing the guys down later, it was smarter. Rucker wanted to ambush them at the drop. Your cousin said he’d drop the money.”
    I held up a hand to stop him. “Drop it where at the minimart? Inside? Outside? Dumpster? What?”
    Tom volunteered, “By the sign on the highway.”
    Another good idea. I knew that sign. It lay on the highway side of the drainage ditch. A passenger could reach out, grab the bag, and the car could be rolling on its way without anyone needing to set foot out of it.
    I rubbed my temples. “So what happened?”
    Punk and Tom were taking turns not looking at me. I sighed. “Is this another Charlie-Fox?”
    Charlie-Fox is a nice way to say cluster-f….well, you get the idea.
    “Not because of us,” said Tom staunchly. “It was Rucker.”
    Of course it was.
    When Tom and Punk agreed that Rucker couldn’t be trusted, they decided to go along for the fun in plain clothes. They settled in at the minimart, which served cheap barbecue and burgers, where they could keep an eye on things. Out in the parking lot, Rucker had his three favorite pets in their own cars, lights off, parked facing the highway for a quick start. The K&R consultant, Clay, had chosen to stand in the trees in the median, with a pair of binoculars and only God knew what else. Rucker himself was parked in his squad car a hundred yards or so down the highway, to give chase. As far as Tom and Punk knew, courtesy Punk’s informant, Clay thought Rucker had agreed to his plan to retrieve me first and the bad guys later.
    At a few minutes before six, Cousin Robert rolled up in his Mercedes SUV, as if buying gas, and dropped a leather overnight bag by the sign. Then he rolled on out again.
    At six-oh-one, a dark-colored four-door sedan suddenly swerved onto the shoulder. The passenger door opened, and someone leaned out, grabbed the bag, and slammed the door shut. The sedan rocketed off. So did Rucker’s boys. So did Rucker. Tom and Punk compared notes. They’d neither of them gotten a good view of the driver or passenger, but they agreed on the first two letters of the license plate, and that the car was made by GM. Probably a Chevy Malibu, and probably late 1990s to early 2000s. No later than 2003, because Punk’s old car had been a 2004, and he knew the difference in the grille.
    The agreement had been that I would be dropped off once the ransom was confirmed.
    What bothered me was that you don’t fit ten million dollars into a carry-on bag. You just don’t. So had the Ellers negotiated down the price? Or was something else going on we didn’t know?
    Who was I kidding? There’s always something else going on the cops don’t know.
    Out in the parking lot of the minimart, a screaming match started between Steven Clay and Chief Rucker. Thanks to Rucker’s boys, Clay had no chance to get a license plate or a visual ID using his night-vision binoculars. Rucker’s boys had, to top it all off, lost the car when it veered onto the road into Brown and Gilfoyle, then sheered right back